We started talking last week about dreaming and, and what
dreams we might or might not have for the year that's coming.
This week we're reading about dreams and, and more than one
dream we're taking a look at today.
But this dream of, of Jacob that he had, it was at a low point in
his life. He was running away because he'd
lied to his father. He'd cheated his brother and his
brother was threatening his life.
Anyone have family problems? I hope you haven't arrived at
the point where you're having to leave town because a sibling is
threatening your life. But that's where Jacob was.
And and all of this in spite of or in some ways because of the
vision that God had given to his mother Rebecca when she said
that Jacob would rule over his older brother Esau.
Now he's are now Jacob again is on the run.
He's sleeping outdoors. The best thing he can find for a
pillow is a rock. And he lies down and he dreams
the dream that Devin just read to us.
So we're talking about that dream and and other God-given
dreams because it is clear that this dream came to Jacob from
God himself. It wasn't bad burrito, it wasn't
stress and anxiety over his family situation.
It was divine inspiration, God working in his life, sharing
with some, sharing something with him that would have power
in his life because Jacob's dream, Jacob's dream was
God-given and God-given dreams have power.
Now before I go any further than that, I want to talk about, just
take a little bit of a moment for a disclaimer here.
God-given dreams are frankly rare.
This is not something anyone that is a follower of God,
whether Jewish or Christian or otherwise.
Anyone that's a follower of God would expect to get a God-given
dream every night. There's a lot of folks that
don't get God-given dreams their entire life.
It's a rare kind of occurrence. One of the great spiritual
writers and, and thinkers in the Christian faith is, is Teresa of
Avila, Saint Teresa of Avila. And she had visions, she had
dreams. She wrote these things down at
the direction of her superiors and shared them with others.
And one of the things she said is that it's a dangerous thing
in the Christian life to live for those kinds of things, these
these dramatic spiritual experiences, whether it's dreams
or visions or other kinds of spiritual experiences like that,
that are, that are not typical and not ordinary.
And one of the risks is we can come to live for those things
instead of for God. We start seeking the experience
rather than seeking God himself. One of the other dangers is that
we can think that if we don't get those kinds of dreams, then
God just must not speak to me or God must not care about me.
God speaks to us in many different ways.
God speaks to us through scriptures.
God speaks to us through other people.
God speaks to us through through impulses and inclinations that
might come to our hearts and to our minds.
God speaks to us, hopefully through preaching and teaching
of people around us. God can speak to us through
books. God speaks to us through current
events and, and I almost said newspapers, but I'm not sure
even God speaking through newspapers anymore, you know,
Internet. God speaks to us in many, many,
many different ways. And, and one of the clearest
ways is through the poor and the helpless and the outcasts who
are around us. So if you're not having dreams,
if you're not having dramatic spiritual experiences, that
doesn't mean there's something wrong with you.
It means those kinds of things are rare.
The early desert fathers, some of them taught that these
experience. This might have been Teresa as
well that these types of experiences, dreams and visions
and and and the very dramatic things God only gives people
whose faith is so weak that they need something extra.
So, so Jacob having a dream and others having dreams and having
big dramatic spiritual experiences is not if if you
don't get that, it's not a sign that there's something wrong
with you want to say that because I've encountered folks
that kind of had felt over the years like, oh, this kind of
thing never happens to me. Am I, am I not really following
Jesus? If you're following Jesus, God
doesn't necessarily for everyone who's following Jesus
communicate in this way. So don't sweat it, don't worry
about it. But when we see these dreams,
when we hear of these dreams, it is important for us to take note
and to pay attention because partly because they are so rare,
Jacob has had this dream. God felt fit for it to be
included in the writings of Scripture.
So it's something important for us to pay attention to.
We're going to do that now as we look at the power of a God-given
dream. And there's lots of different
ways we can look at the power of a God-given dream.
We're going to look at two ways here this morning.
One of those, and the first is this, that the power of a
God-given dream is hope. Here's Jacob fleeing for his
life, running to find relatives that, as far as we know, he has
never met before, in another land, in another country,
traveling by himself through the wilderness, A dangerous prospect
at any time. He had apparently had didn't
have enough time to take much of anything with him at all.
Because again, he's lying on the ground with a rock for a pillow,
and God meets him there, and he has this dream.
And in this dream, God renews for him, shares with him the
covenant that he gave to his grandfather Abraham and to his
father Isaac, men who probably had an almost mythical status in
his mind. The stories that he must have
heard from his father about his grandfather Abraham, the stories
that he heard about his own father, Isaac and the things
that he had done and the wonders that God had worked around and
through him. And here's Jacob running for his
life, having been told by his mom, hey, you're inheriting the
covenant, the promise that God made to your grandfather and
your father. And, and, and he's, but he's
done these things. He's, he's, he's cheated his
brother, he's stolen from his brother.
He's lied to his father. Now he's on the run.
And maybe he's wondering, have I blown it?
Am I out that I disqualify myself sometime?
We don't really know what was going on in his mind, only his
present circumstances. But they're in the midst of
this, in the midst of running away, in the midst of camping
out by himself in the wilderness with no one to protect him, no
one to watch his back, no one to keep watch at night while he's
sleeping. Nothing to lie on, nothing to
pillow his head but the ground and a rock.
And God says, Jacob, Jacob, this land that you're lying on now,
it's all going to belong to you. The covenant I made with
Abraham, the covenant made with Isaac, I make with you.
This land will be yours and your descendants forever.
You'll have descendants that that spread numerous as the
stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore.
All of this I promise to you. And Jacob woke from that dream
with hope. A vision of the future that
didn't include him running for his life with no one to watch
his back and nothing to cover him as he slept on the ground.
A vision of God providing and caring.
A vision of a legacy of descendants, of people who would
follow after him and come through him and be a blessing to
the world. His circumstances, his present
circumstances, had not changed 1 little bit.
He was still alone in the wilderness.
He still had nothing to cover himself.
He still had no one to watch his back.
He was still going to a place where he had never been before
to seek help from people that he had never met.
But now he had hope. He had this hope, this dream of
a future that was given to him by God.
There's power in that. There's power in a God-given
dream. There's hope in a God-given
dream. There are dangers in a God-given
dream as well. And we have to be aware of those
risks because when these dreams come, we can.
I'm going to make sure. I might have forgotten
something. Nope, I didn't forget.
I just moved it. That's all right.
I was like, oh, OK, forget that. I didn't forget the dangers in a
God-given dream. There's a couple.
One of the dangers in a God-given dream is when we get
that dream and when, whether we hear it directly from God itself
or whether someone else is sharing their dream like Martin
Luther King Junior did 1963. Part of the reason we have the
celebration and the holiday this weekend, that that dream that
comes from God, there's power in it, there's hope in it.
But part of the danger in those kind of dreams is that rather
than hearing it and receiving it as a dream and the hope that it
gives as a promise from God, God gave I, God gave Jacob a promise
in that dream of something that God would do in and through and
for Jacob and his descendants. One of the dangers is, is when
we take that dream and turn it into an assignment.
I've got this dream. I have to make it happen.
Human dreams are like that. When humans have dreams, whether
whether you know, you're Elon Musk or or someone whose dreams
are on a lot smaller scale, you got to dream about flying to
Mars or a dream about owning your own home.
When we have human level dreams, generally speaking, we have to
work to make those things happen.
Those kind of dreams, you know, are are assignments that we give
ourselves to make something happen, to bring about the
future that we are dreaming of. But when it's a God-given dream,
that's not an assignment that we have to accomplish.
If Jacob had woken up from that saying, all right, I got to get
a bunch of land. I got to figure out how am I
going to buy all this land? Or maybe I should raise an army
and conquer this land. And I got to start having a lot
of kids. He did end up having a lot of
kids. If I'm going to have all of
these descendants in these future generations, what do I
need to do to make this happen? Now suddenly, Now suddenly Jacob
is setting on a trajectory to try to accomplish for himself
what God has said he's going to do.
And anytime we put ourselves in God's shoes and try to
accomplish for ourselves what only God can accomplish and what
God has in fact promised to accomplish, we tend to just get
in the way of what God is doing. Doesn't necessarily keep God
from doing it, but it can make our life and the lives of the
people around us a whole lot more stressful and a whole lot
more of a headache than it needed to be.
I think that's a little bit of why Jacob was on the run.
His mother, Rebecca, had this vision that she probably shared
with Jacob. AI know you're the second born.
I know the first born inherits the the, the covenant and
inherits the blessing, but God told me you're going to inherit
that. And then they proceeded to get
to those things through deceit, through lies, through treachery.
And now their family is divided and at war with itself, trying
to make happen what God has promised He will do.
So when we hear these dreams, our job isn't to make them
happen. The church has messed this up so
many times in so many ways throughout history.
We read the Book of Revelation of how God gathers his armies
and God defeats the forces of the enemy, Satan, the beast, the
dragon, however you want to name him.
And we say, ah, that's what God wants us to do.
Let's gather our armies and defeat the infidels, defeat the
savages, kill the people that are heretics, all of these
things to make God's Kingdom come on earth just as it is in
heaven, like we pray about every Sunday.
And that's not the way to do these things.
God has promised one day Jesus will return.
One day Jesus will establish his Kingdom in full view for
everyone to see here on earth as it is in the heavens right now.
One day that will happen. God has not given us the
assignment of making it happen. And every time the church has
taken that attitude, we have done awful, awful things in the
world, things from crusades to genocides to, to torture to, to
execute the attitude of Christians fighting Christians
in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and, and into even into
modernity of, of when we go into a town, we have to kill all of
the heretics. Or what if we kill some actual
faithful believers in the process?
And the policy was kill them all and let God sort them out
because we've got to make God's Kingdom come.
We've got to make sure that God's will is done on earth as
it is in heaven. Those are extreme examples, but
we can do similar things in much smaller ways that are still very
hurtful and destructive. When we have the hope of a
God-given dream, our hope should not be in our capacity to make
it come true, but in God's faithfulness and God's power and
God's willingness to make it come true.
That's the power and the danger of a God-given dream.
We're going to avoid those dangers.
We do need to know what is our part of it.
I mean, God didn't just give a dream just to make Jacob feel
good, just to make Jacob, you know, happier about his present
situation. It wasn't simply an act of
comfort. I don't think God-given dreams
are just acts of comfort. If we're going to avoid these
dangers, one of the things we need to do is look at the other
part of the God-given dream, which is purpose.
Purpose. By having that dream, Jacob
could see that God's plan, God's purpose for him was more than
just him living his life and doing his thing.
He was part of a bigger story. His life was going someplace and
the trajectory of his life was not was going to extend not just
to the to the point where he breathed his final breath, but
beyond that for generations and generations and generations.
God-given dreams give us purpose.
They help us find our place in the story and see the kinds of
things that we need to do. Now one of the other dangers I
should have mentioned this under the danger slide of a God-given
dream particular if we take it as an assignment is that that it
can become overwhelming. I can never do that.
I can never accomplish that. Jacob could have been
overwhelmed by that dream. God, how can I ever possess all
of this land when I'm all alone? I don't have kids, I don't have
an army, I don't have anything, I don't have the money.
How am I going to do this? And my own brother's trying to
kill me. I can't even take, you know,
over the inheritance that now belongs to me.
How can I get all of this other way?
We could be paralyzed by a dream that's overwhelming if we think
it's our responsibility to fulfill it.
There was a monastic desert father, early Christian
monastics before the church split into Catholic and
Protestant and all of this kind of stuff.
There were a group of men and women that went off into the
wilderness. They did this after Christianity
became legalized and and for the 1st 400 years of Christianity,
being a Christian was a risky proposition.
There was not constant persecution.
Christians weren't constantly hiding from Romans or from
others, but there was periodic persecution and there was often
social problems and social outcast.
And it was to become a Christian, it cost you.
In those days you, you would lose respect, you would lose
status in society, you would lose some relationships, you
would lose some position. It cost you.
And at times it could cost you your own life.
And then the emperor converted to Christianity and Christianity
became the the dominant and preferred religion of the
empire. And now becoming a Christian got
you something in a temporal sense beyond being part of God's
family. It got social blessing and
social approval and opportunities for social
advancement. And and there was a whoa, boy, I
hope I didn't break that. There was a movement within the
church at that time that said some people felt we still need
to show the world that following Jesus costs you and and some
men, some women, some on their own, some in groups, went out to
live lives of severe self-discipline and personal
deprivation. They never claimed that was
God's call for everyone. In fact, most people that came
and said hey, I want to join you, they would talk them out of
it and say no, you really don't want to join me.
This isn't for everyone. This is, you know, unless God's
called you to it, that you don't even want to try it.
And, and they, there's a lot of surviving stories from those
folks and, and they're, some of them are really, really cool.
And this is one of those stories.
It was about a father who was a landowner and, and he had
purchased a new piece of property.
And that property was covered with thorns and briars.
It was a large piece of property.
It was adjacent but distant from where they lived, adjacent to
the land they owned, but distant from where they lived.
And he gave his son, who was becoming an adult, the
assignment of clearing that property.
You got to go in. You got to clear out all of the
thorns. You got to clear out all of the
briars. So it becomes arable land.
Whether they wanted to graze on it or plant crops on it, I don't
know. But he needed to clear it.
And the son went out. He was proud to receive the
assignment. He was glad to do it.
He walked to the edge of that property.
He got there. He looked out from a hilltop and
saw this vast stretch of land absolutely covered in briars and
thorns. You know, I just got to get to
it. And he spent an entire day
clearing land. And at the end of the day, he
had a space that was about, you know, 6 by 610, by 10, not very
big at all. He worked hard.
He worked hard and he was overwhelmed.
He said, I'm never going to get this done.
I'm never going to get it done. He went back home.
His dad asked him how it went when great dad, he slept that
night. The next day he went back out
and he got there and he looked around again and he said there's
no way. And he was so overwhelmed by how
big the project was that he found himself immobilized.
And instead of spending the day working, he laid down on that
patch that he cleared the day before.
And he went to sleep. And he did that day after day
after day, week after week after week, for months.
And then to his horror, one day when he got up, his dad said to
him at breakfast, hey, I'm going to come out and check and see
how things are going. And the son knew he was in
trouble. And he walked out and he was
trembling all the way and he wasn't talking.
And he was. And they got out there and the
father looked out and saw this vast stretch of land still
covered in briars except for one small patch on the edge.
He looked at his son. What happened?
His son told him it was so big I was overwhelmed.
And so I've just been coming here every day and sleeping.
And his dad said to him, Son, don't you know that if you had
just cleared a patch big enough to sleep on every day that you
would be done by now? That's our role too, as we read
about God's Kingdom coming and God's will being done on this
earth as it is in heaven. That's our role, to do just
enough work every day to make just enough progress every day
that we can lay down and sleep at night and rest and be ready
for more work the next day. There's another dream that, and
I mentioned it before, Martin Luther King Junior's I have a
dream speech is famous. I'm going to read a portion of
that here today. And it's it's an extended quote.
It won't take too long, but I want to read it and I'm not even
going to try. I'm not going to try to imitate
King's cadences or delivery. I'm just going to read you the
words I say today, my friends. So even though we face the
difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.
It is a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out
the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the
sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will
be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day, even in the state of
Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice,
sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed
into an Oasis of Freedom and Justice.
I have a dream that my 4 little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their
skin, but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day down
in Alabama, with its vicious racist, with its governor having
his lips dripping with the words of interposition and
nullification, one day right there and Alabama, little black
boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with
little white boys and little white girls as sisters and
brothers. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted,
every hill and mountain shall be made low, The rough places will
be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight,
and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed in all flesh.
Shall see, shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back
to the South with. With this faith, we will be able
to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.
With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling
discords of our nation into a beautiful Symphony of
brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able
to work together to pray together, to struggle together,
to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing
that we will be free one day. This will be the day when all of
God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning.
My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty of thee I sing.
Land where my father's died, Land of the pilgrims, pride from
every mountainside. Let freedom ring.
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we
let it ring from every village and every hamlet and every state
and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of
God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles,
Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing
the words of the old Negro spiritual.
Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free
at last. These dreams, Jacob's dream,
like King's dream, was a massive big project.
And a big step was taken in 1963 with the passage of the Civil
Rights Act. And things are much better now
than they used to be. But there's still work to do.
There's still division, there's still hostility.
There's still the fighting of person against person along this
line and that line. And, and you know, just hearing
folks talk about that this morning, not necessarily on
racial division, but in all of the division that there is in
our country right now. All of the hatred, all of the
hostility, all of the fear, all of the anxiety, this ongoing
sense of hopelessness of how can we get better?
How can we improve? How can we claim that that one
day God's Kingdom is coming and God's will will be done here on
earth just like it is in heaven. We can claim it because God has
promised it. We can believe it because God
has promised it and and we can't make it happen.
We can't, we can't make it happen.
We can't force other people to live into it.
All we can do, all we can do is do our work on a daily basis.
The little things that God puts in front of us, loving our
neighbor is ourself. Showing compassion and kindness
to others even if they're different than we are.
Responding to hatred with love. Responding to hostility with
compassion. Responding to antagonism with
kindness. Just like Jesus did.
And is any one of those acts going to change the world?
No, no, but as followers of Jesus we were.
I did breakthrough remote control well, or at least I
damaged it a little. Jesus is our purpose and our
hope. The covenant God made with Jacob
is not the same covenant that God made with us.
God made a land covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with
Jacob. God promised real estate.
God has promised us life eternal, no matter what the
people of this world do to us. God has promised us Jesus is
Lord and King forever, and one day his Kingdom will come and
his will will be done on this earth as it is in heaven.
Jesus is our purpose and Jesus is our promise.
So we like Nathaniel, we like Peter, we like all of those
other disciples, Mary and, and Joseph and James and who all of
these other folks that we're following after Jesus.
Our purpose, our hope is Jesus to follow in his footsteps, to
live as much as possible that we can like he lived.
And sometimes that's going to involve some dramatic action
with great risk and, and, and, and, and, and occasionally maybe
even spectacular results. But most of the time it's just
going to be the day-to-day stuff done in the name of Jesus with
an eye toward the future that God has promised as we share
love and compassion in simple ways with ourselves and with the
people around us. In Jesus name, Amen.
Amen. Oh, oh, I forgot, I forgot to go
back. I take back the amens, Niemeh.
I guess that's Amen backwards. There we go.
You will see Jesus said this. You will see heaven open up in
the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.
Jesus was referencing eyes or Jacob's dream at that moment
when he was talking to that brand new person, his brand new
disciple, just first committed to five, just signed up for the
job. And you will see the angels of
God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.
But he tweaked the dream a little bit.
Jesus is the latter. Jesus is now the gateway, the
one that connects heaven and earth.
Jesus is the one. That will bring heaven to earth
and will bring earth into heaven, if we.
Keep our focus on. Him and keep Him as our purpose
and Him as our hope and day-to-day follow Him, because
even small acts of justice, mercy and love reveal the truth
and goodness of Christ's Kingdom and a broken world.
Now Jesus name, Amen. Amen.
Let's stand sing together. My hope is built.
Fixed. My hope is.
Built. On nothing less than Jesus blood
and righteousness I cannot trust.
Sweet as framed, but wholly lean.
On Jesus name on. Christ the solid.
Rock I stand on the ground is sinked all up sinking.
Sand. When?
Darkness. Veils his lovely face.
I rest on His unchanging grace in every.
High and stormy Gale. My anchor holds within.
The. Veil on Christ the.
Solid. Rock, I stand.
All other ground is sinking sand.
His oath is. Coven and his blood support me
in the whelming flood, when all around the soul gives way.
Heathen is all my hope and stay on Christ the.
Solid. Rock, I stand.
All other ground is sinking sand.
And I shall come with trumpet. Sound O may I then in Him be
found pressed in his righteousness alone, for us to
stand before the throne on Christ the.
Solid rock, I stand all. Other ground is sinking sand.
All other ground is sinking sand.
We have these God. Given dreams in front of us,
even if we haven't dreamed of ourselves, those who have gone
before us have. Jesus has given us this vision.
This has given us this dream of God's Kingdom come, God's will
be done. One of the terms Martin Luther
King used for that was God's beloved community, that the
earth becomes God's beloved community.
The hope that we have is not in our capacity to make it happen,
but in God's faithfulness to keep His promise that one day it
will happen. In the meantime, we live into
that hope. We live into that future by
doing daily the things that Jesus taught us to do, loving
our neighbor, loving God, serving others with compassion
and kindness and gentleness. In Jesus name, Amen.